Barbara Yaffe: For Israel, settlement construction is a security issue

Barbara Yaffe, Vancouver Sun columnist12.06.2012

Israel plans to build 3,000 new settler homes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, a move that prompted widespread, international objections. Palestinians claim the plans will bisect the West Bank and cut any future state in half. Here a Palestinian labourer works at a settler housing construction site in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Ariel.

With the world heaping venom on Israel for a just-announced plan for new West Bank settlements, an observer might wonder if there’s another side to this story.

What can the Israelis be thinking?

To recap: On Nov. 29 Palestinians won a United Nations vote naming Palestine a non-member observer state, the operative word being state. The following day Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans to build 3,000 new homes on West Bank land, a plan Palestinians claim will make a two-state solution impossible.

Even European countries friendly to Israel have aggressively condemned Israel’s plan, as has the U.S.

And, on Wednesday, Israel’s No. 1 backer — Prime Minister Stephen Harper — registered his objection. Until then, the Harper government said only that unilateral action on either side is unhelpful.

The seeking of UN support for statehood was a unilateral action by Palestinians, and, importantly, a violation of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords.

As Hoover Institution scholar David Davenport, a lawyer and Pepperdine University president, explained in Forbes: “Under this legal convention, Palestine agreed not to change its international status except through the [Oslo] Accords and the peace process they established.”

Israel thus was frustrated by the UN vote, which came on the heels of a confrontation with Gaza, resulting from the terror group Hamas having lately fired some 10,000 rockets into Israel.

Netanyahu’s announcement possibly was an appeal to his political base in advance of elections next month. But, in fact, the plan for the 3,000 new homes to accommodate needs of Israel’s burgeoning population had been in the works for years.

That’s because the so-called E1 site where development would occur — a barren hill smaller in size than a former Toronto ward, at 12 square kilometres — is located between the West Bank settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, with a population of 40,000 Jews, and East Jerusalem.

Israel wants this to be a contiguous area for the security of those Ma’ale Adumim residents.

It argues, a tunnel can be built connecting any future Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem to the West Bank area beyond Ma’ale Adumim.

An assertion the E1 development would bar north-south West Bank travel is refuted by viewing a map, though travellers between Ramallah and Jerusalem thereafter would have to drive further by road, around Ma’ale Adumim.

The presumption on Israel’s part: the E1-Ma’ale Adumim area, in any future peace deal, would become part of Israel to ensure security against attacks like the ones recently sustained from Gaza, a territory from which Israel withdrew 21 settlements in 2005.

In exchange, other lands would be transferred to Palestinians as compensation.

Yes, the new settlements would complicate peacemaking. But many Israelis — knowing Palestinians already have rejected several peace offers — no longer believe the other side truly wants a peace deal.

As to Israel’s security fixation, respected Israeli author, historian and scholar Barry Rubin explains: “Palestinian Authority schools teach that Israel should be wiped off the map; sermons in Palestinian Authority mosques say that Israel should be wiped off the map; Palestinian officials demand that eventually Israel be wiped off the map.

“Those who murder Israeli citizens are glorified by the Palestinian Authority, which names schools, squares and soccer tournaments after them.”

In addition, Palestinian calls for their right of return to Israel, even following creation of a Palestinian state, reinforces Israeli suspicions that their neighbour aims to demographically flood Israel, to create two Palestinian states, one in Palestine and one in Israel.

And so, there indeed are two sides to this, as to nearly all, stories. It’s just that the Israeli one is being ignored.

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Barbara Yaffe: For Israel, settlement construction is a security issue

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